Click on the YouTube icon to get a higher quality version.

Maria uses her macro lens to close in on our Fava Beans, which are covered in black aphids. Instead of reporting a bad news story, she points out all the beneficial insects dining on the aphids and shows us a bucket of ripe beans that survived despite the pest attack. Later she turned the harvested beans into a delicious Fava Bean humous.

More on Fava Beans here.

Click on the YouTube icon to get a higher quality video.

We grow lots of garlic at the Vancouver Compost Garden. But not many people know about scapes, the flowering stems that appear in June about three weeks before the bulbs are harvested.

Maria picked some of our scapes and prepared a quick and easy recipe for delicious pesto sauce.

1943 National Dairy Products Corporation and affiliated companies

“The Earth and I are friends now”

Last year I never thought of the earth except as something to walk on. But in the spring I turned up the sod and planted seed. Summer – grubbing for weeds and watching things grow – I got friendly with the land.

Well, it’s autumn now. The crop wasn’t big – but fair enough. And something good has happened to our family! We’ve weeded and watered and hoped together. And said our table blessing over our own harvest.

It seems to me that my family has come back to some important things. Come back to one another – and to our good soil. Come back to being neighbors with the family whose garden row begins where ours leaves off.

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My Handkerchief Garden, 1889
By Barnard, Charles, 1838-1920
New York, Garden Publishing
62 pages

Excerpts below:

At last it was found ; a six-room house with a mere handkerchief of a garden, measuring about one-thirtieth of an acre, or about as big as a city back yard. The soil was a wet, heavy clay, full of stones, and shaded by a number of tall trees growing on the next lot. In March, 1887, we moved to the place, and on the twenty-first we paid twenty-five cents for one ounce of Tennis Ball Lettuce seed. So it was the scrap of a garden began, and thereon does hang the more or less learned remarks that make this book.

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World War One Food Garden Parade. circa 1914.

Produce from village war gardens on display. Opens with parade. Man leading horse pulling a wagon of produce and Union Jack stuck on front. Boy Scouts walk behind the wagon carrying gardening tools and flags. Then a local marching band. This procession comes marching into town square; as other people watch. Lots of lettuces; other vegetables piled high on truck; pan to men standing beside truck; and another truck loaded up with marrows and potatoes and things — less leafy than the other one;

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From the Fortress of Louisbourg by SchoolNet

Founded in 1713 for its cod fishery, Louisbourg enjoyed three peaceful decades as a French colonial seaport. New Englanders captured the town in 1745, but watched its return to France three years later. The peace was shortlived and in 1758, the British captured the town a second time. In 1760, Louisbourg’s fortifications were destroyed and the small British garrison left the fortress eight years later.

Food Gardens

When the French first arrived in Louisbourg, they found the soil to be of below average quality for their gardening. The poor soil combined with the harsh climate inhibited the residents from growing the vegetables and herbs in the quantity or quality of which they were accustomed to in France. Consequently townspeople would often bring soil from other parts of the island and mix it with the original soil in their gardens. The resulting gardens, known as potagers, had an assortment of vegetables and herbs which were used as dyes as well as for cooking and medicinal purposes. Typical vegetables grown were: cabbages, turnip, carrots, beans, and peas. Common herbs were: mint, parsley, sage and thyme.

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Mr. Patriot’s front garden in Town, as it was.

And as he hopes to have it this year. Potatoes, Parsnips, Turnips.

By W.K. Haselden
Daily Mirror, Great Britain
19 Jan. 1917

European Chafer in Vancouver from Michael Levenston on Vimeo.
See High Definition HD Vimeo version here.
Also see alternative HD High Definition version on YouTube.

Lawns are being dug up all over the east side of Vancouver by birds and animals looking for the fat grubs of the European Chafer Beetle. Maria goes out to look at a boulevard where crows are having breakfast on someone’s no-longer-perfect lawn. She makes some suggestions for homeowners – they can use nematodes to help control the pest, or find an alternative to grass. How about vegetables?

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Watch Composting in Singapore

With the sound of cicadas in the background, Esme shows us how she composts at home in Singapore and avoids attracting venomous snake such as King Cobras and vipers, and non-venomous pythons (adults grow to a maximum of more than 32 feet).

And for more about nature in Singapore, read the following article:

Wildlife’s revenge – Even in urban Singapore, it can sometimes be a jungle

Two to three times a week, Singapore police receive a call from a resident reporting a visit by one of Singapore’s many snakes.

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Photo by Matt and Polly. Mapalo gardens. See larger image here.

By Godfrey Hampwaye, Etienne Nel, Christian M Rogerson
Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 2007,
Volume 25, pages 553 – 572
May 2007

Abstract

The topic of urban agriculture has, for a significant period of time, been recognized as a key facet of urban survival in the cities in the South. While it normally forms part of multilivelihood strategies and its overall significance is the subject of some debate, it nonetheless is an important feature of both urban landscapes and urban survival. This paper examines the current status quo of urban agriculture in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia.

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Watch 1943 – You Cannot Eat Lilies – Victory Garden Video

Perhaps the weirdest Victory Garden video ever.
1943 Dig For Victory Leaflet No 1

Dialogue from the video.

“In spring this gardener sowed away
He meant to eat well every day.”

Gardener: Waiter,

Father Time: Yes Sir, coming Sir.
Your summer course Sir.
Pardon Sir, will you order your winter course now?
I say will you order your winter course now?

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2nd July 1937: Children in the allotments of the London Children’s Gardens Fund at Clerkenwell take a break from gardening with their weekly bout of boxing. Larger image here.

Photo Bill Keay, Vancouver Sun. Meeru sitting in centre with fellow club members.

By Meeru Dhalwala
The Vancouver Sun, 26 Nov 2008

I certainly didn’t have an idyllic childhood, but I did gain some idyllic principles from my mom and dad. It used to drive me crazy when either one would yell at me for getting even a “ B” on a test or for not finishing my lunch, even if the bread was stale.

“ In India . . .” was how they always started the guilt trip. As I became older, I yelled back that they were the ones who had brought me to the U. S. and that I wasn’t going to feel guilty about all the poor people in India.

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We Harvest Jerusalem Artichokes from Michael Levenston on Vimeo. Click on the Vimeo link to watch a High Definition (HD) version of this video.
Also see alternative HD High Definition version on YouTube.

Maria planted lots of Jerusalem artichokes last April and now we are harvesting buckets of these tasty tubers.

Jerusalem artichokes or Sunchokes are a perennial sunflower with tasty potato-like tubers. 6-8 ft tall with daisy-like flowers, sunchokes are very hardy and can become weedy, so plant them in a bed that is permanent. Harvest from August through late Fall. Nutty tasting tubers become sweeter after frost when left in the ground!

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Pacific Drug Review Magazine, 1944

Burma-Shave was an American brand of brushless shaving cream, famous for its advertising gimmick of posting humorous rhyming poems on small, consecutive highway billboard signs.

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REUTERS – Oct 28, 2008
Reuters video in Spanish, linked. The video doesn’t seem to have been picked up by a news outlet and there is no news commentary in the footage. A raw script, which accompanies the video, and translation of the comments by the Cubans who were interviewed, is attached below this article.

Cubans hope urban gardens will solve food shortages caused by hurricane damage.

In the face of its greatest food shortage since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba has fallen back on urban agriculture, which helped provide relief in the 1990′s during the Caribbean island’s “special period”.

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Watch 1940 Kids Learn to Food Garden

1940 ‘Gardening’ an instructional sound film. (10 minutes)
Produced by Erpi Classroom Films Inc.
In collaboration with Ellen Eddy Shaw, MA
Brooklyn Botanic Garden
Encyclopedia Britannica Films – ‘Bring the world to the Classroom”

The Child’s Food Garden – ‘with a few suggestions for flower culture’
School Garden Series.
By Van Evrie Kilpatrick, 1918
Principal of the Carlisle School, New York City and assigned to supervision of School and Home Gardens. President of the School Garden Association of America
65 pages. Includes many photos and illustrations

Preface:

Every boy and every girl who has a garden at home, or who is given a plot in a school garden, ought to learn to do the work successfully. Yet, as the author has found, children, especially those who live in cities and towns, know little or nothing about producing anything from the soil, and since the teacher cannot always be present to direct the work, there is a danger that discouraging mistakes will be made.

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Surrey may be home to region’s first vertical greenhouse

By Kelly Sinoski, The Vancouver Sun
21 Oct 2008

Rooftop gardens and vertical greenhouses could be a sign of the times in Metro Vancouver as the region wrestles with ways to tackle a global food crisis and the effects of climate change.

And Surrey could lead the trend, with at least one developer considering building a so-called vertical farm in Whalley, which is slated to become the region’s second downtown.

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Photo by Donald Street Farms

Entrepreneurs set out to farm unused residential yards – and make money to boot

By Moira Dann
The Globe and Mail
October 20, 2008

VICTORIA — It all started in June for Deb Heighway with a call from her brother, Craig, proving that good ideas grow roots and flourish quickly. He had declared himself CPO – “chief pitchfork operator” – of an urban farming venture in Vancouver, and he urged her to give the concept a try.

“The timing was right, as I had just finished a contract,” said Ms. Heighway, who works helping people who have suffered brain injury. “And I said: ‘Why not?’ ”

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